A maturing Marilyn Manson says mid-life forced him to refresh his sound

Growing older being Marilyn Manson takes practice.

The singer came on the scene in 1996 playing pop-friendly industrial rock, but a ghoulish image and skill set for self-mythology quickly made him a media creature that appeared to be a collision of Alice Cooper with Trent Reznor. Manson embraced the role, never appearing in public without his spooky makeup and costumes, and freely prodding interviewers with stories more outlandish than the next. Then came the massacre at Columbine High School outside Denver. The right-wing media blamed his music for providing the teenage shooters with an incentive to kill, a ludicrous claim but one that added to his uncomfortable relationship with the public.

“I know it’s awkward for people to meet someone like me. A lot of people who don’t know me think I’m something on the Internet; they don’t think I’m a real person, that he’s a fiction. And sometimes I am,” he says.

These days, Manson is less inclined to spin yarns about the buckets of sex and drugs he digests than he is to tell an interviewer he is an avid reader (“The one thing in my life I love other than trouble would be books”) or that his favorite companion is his 11-year-old cat. Speaking by phone last month, in what was often a disjointed and rambling manner, Manson admitted that being Brian Warner, a journalism student in Fort Lauderdale, was boring.

“So I created a monster to fill in the blanks,” he says.

The monster is in the wings of “The Pale Emperor” (Lorna Vista Recordings), his 10th album, but one that feels less influenced by the past and more of a conscious reinvention of his music and image. The music is far more scaled back from the blasting industrial production of his earliest records and is positioned as a kind of neo-blues that would not sound out of place next to groups like the Black Keys.

Much of the credit for the refresh is Tyler Bates, a film composer (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” “300”) who met Manson on the set of the Showtime series “Californication,” which Bates was scoring and Manson was appearing in an acting role. Manson says Bates pushed him to be more introspective in his lyrics while keeping the music basic.

“I had this perfect rhythmic moment where he plugged in a guitar and I sang,” he says. “Every song on the record, the main rhythm guitar and vocals were recorded simultaneously. I never went back and changed anything. It was almost like we created some séance, but it was just us two.”

His current tour is similarly minimal. Playing small clubs and theaters, he will be joined by longtime bassist Twiggy Ramirez, with Bates on guitar. “Killing Strangers,” which opens the album, is stripped to just a thwacking beat and swaggering guitar riff, while the buzzing “Third Day of a Seven Day Binge” is cinematic due to more orchestrated guitar arrangements.

Manson, 46, says growing older has filled him with nostalgia about what life was like before his star turn. “I never intended to be a celebrity. I strangely still feel trapped in the moment of time when I moved to Los Angeles in 1998. That seems like it was yesterday, strangely,” he says.

He has spent time making amends with people he clashed with in his early days, including Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins who Manson said upset him for sending a letter to warn him about dating Rose McGowan, his girlfriend at the time. He and Corgan reunited in December during a Smashing Pumpkins show in London where he sang the Corgan song “Ava Adore.”

“I forgot that he was the one who taught me how to play guitar. He bought me a guitar for my birthday and I still have it,” he says.

The ever-shifting nature of the music industry, one that is not traditionally kind to performers who appear stuck in a certain time period, or an increasingly rigid cultural climate that looks down at provocateurs, have influenced him to try new things, primarily acting. Manson makes certain it’s known he is a longtime friend of Johnny Depp, but his own acting work has received good reviews. Lately that’s been the role of a white supremacist in the final season of the FX series “Sons of Anarchy.”

Manson says the experience forced him to end bad habits. His days suddenly switched from holding vampire hours to waking up at 6 a.m., undergoing a training regimen to lose weight, dressing more conservatively, and permanently putting the cork in absinthe, his spirit of choice.

“I had to turn things upside-down and my brain started working differently. Now if I see a problem, I’ll try to fix it; I don’t want to create it. That’s what I learned in 2014,” he says.

Not that everything has turned completely serious. Manson still collects horror house memorabilia, including paintings produced by Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy. The only one hanging in his house currently is a portrait Gacy painted of Elvis Presley, he says. “Which makes it very strange because Lisa Marie Presley was the best man at my wedding.”

Mark Guarino is a local freelance writer.

Marilyn Manson and “Deep Six”:

Marilyn Manson and “Third Day of a Seven Day Binge”: